Rain turns the dirt roads to mud!

We had to do about 440 kms (275 miles) yesterday from the Kalahari Farmhouse to the Canyon Roadhouse. There's an easy paved road that goes that distance, but it wouldn't be like us to do it the easy way!

Actually it was more wanting to do it the exciting way instead of the boring way. And exciting it was...

We had done the paved route in reverse when we were camping in November. We remembered the road, and although it was paved, it was very boring. So we took the back roads!

You can see the yellow paved highway that we could have taken. But that would have been boring!

We had a lot of rain on Sunday night, and it was still spitting when we left on Monday morning. But the first part of the back road looked okay, so we took that route.

At first, the road was pretty solid. You can see the large puddles though!

It didn't take long though and the road was mud. 

Very slippery mud. Good thing for all my years of winter driving in Canada. This was just like driving on a snow and ice covered road. Maybe even a little more slippery! Our vehicle is a part time 4 wheel drive, but I never had to engage the system. Not yet, anyhow...

You should have seen the car. The wheel wells were caked with mud.

Sometimes on the back roads here, you have to open and close gates because the road will go right througha  farmer's property. So Ruth gets out at this one and immediately gets hit in the face with a really bad smell. You know the smell like there's something dead around? Ha...check out the look on her face!

One of the cactus varieties here had different flowers.

As you can tell from some of the pictures above, the sky was cloudy pretty much the whole drive. We could see where it was raining in the distance, and some of the clouds were pretty dark. Eventually, it rained on us too!

It poured buckets!

Sorry for the fuzzy picture. When it rains this hard, the water has nowhere to go and it runs in streams across the roadway. The guy in front wanted us to go through first because we had a higher clearance and 4 wheel drive. So I put it in 4 wheel drive, and slowly drove though. We made it, and it wasn't any more than a foot deep. Still, I think we missed the worst of it because we saw a couple of vehicles stuck further on.

We saw a sign for a dam, so we took another shortcut and saw the lake at the dam. They have campsites at the recreation area. Didn't go check for prices or anything. Ruth was taking a picture of the birds.

We drove on, and again saw storm clouds in the distance. These ones were almost black. We were going to have to make a left hand turn soon though, so it looked like we might be able to skirt around it.

And we did. Can't believe we missed this storm!

By the time we got close to Canyon Roadhouse, there was actually some blue sky.

And so we're at the Canyon Roadhouse for two nights. Of course we'll tell you more about it in another post.

Oh, we booked our passage to South Africa! We leave on January 1st at 5:00pm. It's an overnight bus that goes from Windhoek to Cape Town...a 21 hour bus ride. But, it's on their ultra luxury "Sleepliner"! So that should be interesting. We kind of like that we're starting off 2014 by visiting a brand new country!

I guess this is the time to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas! We're missing our parents, children, and grandchildren at this time, but that's the price we pay for doing what we're doing. Won't be doing anything special, although the roadhouse is decorated and ready for Christmas. They're doing a special Christmas lunch tomorrow, but we're heading over to the Canyon Lodge tomorrow morning, so we'll take part in any Christmas goings on that might be happening there. Hope everyone has a great Christmas holiday!